RMRK: Part I
— By Broccoli 2.0
Polkadot is one of the most known blockchains in the past couple of years, all because of the parachain technology. Polkadot and Kusama (Polkadot’s testnet) are simple chains in terms of utility. Their main utility is parachain, and they do not support smart contracts. However, a team found a way other than smart contracts to have NFTs on Kusama. But the utilities of RMRK don’t stop there, it also has cross-chain capabilities, and its NFTs have much more capabilities than EVM or Solana NFTs.
This blog is only an introduction to RMRK. I will follow up with more articles to explain further about the project.
How It Works
The RMRK tech is inspired by an old technique called graffiti on the chain back from the early bitcoin days. Basically, what RMRK does, is that it adds data on the chain in the form of a remark. This means when RMRK is rendering an NFT, it doesn’t get the data from the last block, but it has to process all the existing blocks in order to collect all the remarks related to the NFT and render it. This is the only major downside of the tech, but with the EVM and Rust integration, we won’t have this problem.
NFT Legos
RMRK 2.0 offers 5 main features for NFTs called the lego blocks.
1. Emotes on The Chain
You can react to NFTs on RMRK with emotes on the chain. These emotes can be visible on all of the NFT marketplaces with RMRK integration. This feature is particularly useful to measure hype on an NFT.
2. NFTs Owning Other NFTs (what?)
Well yes, with RMRK, you can give an NFT you own to another NFT. This doesn’t happen only on the metadata level, but it’s also possible to render the child NFT on top of the parent. In other words, you can layer NFTs you own on top of each other. The simplest example of this is having a P2E game avatar as an NFT who yields a weapon. This NFT can own multiple weapon NFTs, but you can change the weapon in the rendering whenever you like. Keep in mind that when you change the appearance of your NFT, it changes on all marketplaces.
3. Conditional Rendering
You can have some attributes rendered differently based on the conditions of the chain. For example, you can condition an ape NFT to have its eyes turn red if the current block number is even.
4. NFTs as DAO
You can divide your NFT into fungible tokens and distribute them to different people. The holders of the fungible tokens can have the voting ability on the NFT. Let’s say an online gaming streamer is about to enter a battle. If his avatar is a DAO NFT, the viewers who are holding the fungible tokens for the avatar NFT can vote and decide on which weapon it will use.
5. Multi resource NFTs
The NFT can have multiple resources, or outputs, depending on the environment. Let’s say you have a book as an NFT. Since RMRK NFTs can contain multiple layers, you can have the book cover as an image, the text as a PDF file, and an audiobook as an audio file in the same NFT. When you list your NFT in a book marketplace, you can have the text as its output, and if you list it in an audio marketplace you can set the audiobook file as an output.
Using these 5 NFT legos, the possibilities are endless for giving more utilities to NFTs, monetizing your assets, and making NFTs, metaverses, and P2E games more interactive and advanced.
Future Plans
RMRK is now in its second version. RMRK 3.0 will be integrated with smart contracts on EVM chains and non-EVM chains like Solana. It already started expanding to chains other than Kusama like Moonriver and Karura. They are also working on a metaverse for their own NFT collection Kanaria.
RMRK Token
The tokenomics are attractive. The supply is limited to 10 000 000 coins, and the team owns only 8% of the supply. The rest was airdropped to the Kanaria egg holders. You can trade RMRK tokens on CEXes like Kucoin or Gate.io. There are no DEXes on Kusama yet so for now it’s impossible to trade on the chain except if you decide to trade OTC which is risky. However, you can trade xcRMRK (xc stands for cross-chain) which is then the wrapped version of the token on Moonriver DEXes like Huckleberry.finance.
The token will have 2 main utilities. The first is for doing tasks on the marketplace and launchpad. You can mint using the RMRK token. The second main utility is the Kanaria metaverse since it will be the main currency for it.
Current Projects
RMRK NFTs exist on 2 projects currently. One is Kanaria (kanaria.rmrk.app) which is the main dapp for the kanaria collection, and Singular (singular.rmrk.app) where you can mint RMRK NFTs, and it’s also a marketplace.
RMRK offers advanced utilities to NFTs. It’s multichain since it’s nested in Kusama, therefore it has a lot of room to grow. When RMRK 3.0 gets released with smart contracts on EVM and non-EVM chains, it will change the whole NFT game. Next part, I will discuss multiple plays you can do with the RMRK NFT legos.
